Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  So when they finally reached the fourth pass, it had been a horrible shock to look over the other side and find that the slope there was insanely steep. The drop fell away so sharply that there was a big section in the middle they couldn’t see at all, which could have been a sheer cliff for all they could tell. The precipice only levelled off a full two thousand feet below them.

  Shackleton, a careful man, had only decided to risk descending this slope because at that point they had no other choice. The three had therefore sat down in a line on their rope, legs around the man in front, and fired down the slope on their bottoms; two thousand feet in a matter of seconds, a drop that certainly could have killed them, as they had no idea what the hidden section below them would bring. Worsley said later he had never been more scared in his life, and he had done a lot of scary things. But they had lived.

  Now, looking down this cliff, Eve had lost it. She refused to try the jump. This is crazy, she cried, this is crazy. Snow conditions might be different now, it might be icier! This must not be the right pass, we must have read the map wrong! We’ll be killed going down this!

  Entirely possible. But this was the right pass, and it was getting dark, and a storm was coming. And they had gone so far that the only way out was forward—an all-too-common mountaineers’ dilemma. And Eve was shivering as well as crying, going into shock perhaps from her fall and the twisted ankle. And they had no tent, nor much food—yes, they were in the same fix as Shackleton—this was the plan after all, to put themselves in the same fix! They had engineered it this way! They too had no choice.

  But Eve refused. Her boyfriend Mike begged her to try, he yelled at her; she yelled back at him, crying harder; their friend Brett tried to reason with her, but got nowhere. Whimpering in straightforward animal fear of death, she refused to make the leap. And while they sat there arguing it got darker and darker, and they were chilling down in a truly dangerous way.

  Finally Val had snapped. She said “Look we’ve got to do this,” and grabbed up Eve, who kicked and screamed like a child in a tantrum, and pulled her around in front of her and jumped over the cornice, shouting back at Mike and Brett to do the same.

  The slide quickly accelerated to something like free fall. Val crushed Eve to her hard, and they skidded down on Val’s backside, airborne at times, going faster and faster until Val was sure they were doomed; it would only take one rock in their path. But they never caught on a rock, never lost balance and tumbled into a bone-shattered bloody mass…. And some timeless interval later, probably less than a minute, they skidded out onto flat thick snow at the bottom of the slope and came to a halt. Mike and Brett arrived seconds later. Val’s pants were shredded, her legs and butt bloodied.

  After that they had had to help Eve, who was crying helplessly all the while; one on each side of her taking turns, though mostly it was Mike and Brett who did that, while Val found the way in the dark, through most of that night. And they reached Stromness just before a giant storm hammered the island.

  Great adventure. But Eve never spoke to her again.

  Now Val looked around McMurdo, remembering Jack’s quick look away at the restaurant table, his scowl. Or that wounded look, when he was hunched out on the ice. She had done it again.

  “I am not a good guide,” she told the empty town. “I am toast.”

  Even though she was very near tears, the word toast reminded her of how hungry she still was. She moved off shakily toward the BFC. She could break into a box of camp crackers there, and hear stories of the other SARs of the last week, and huddle over the space heater to try to get herself warm. “I am the coldest burnt toast in town,” she said, and stopped and let herself cry for a minute before going on.

  “Hello, Phil?”

  “Yeah, who is it? Wade is that you? Where are you?”

  “It’s me, Phil. I’m in Antarctica.”

  “Where? Oh yeah. I was asleep, Wade.”

  “Good.”

  “What’s that you say?”

  “Were you dreaming, Phil? What were you dreaming about?”

  “What? What’s this, you call me up to wake me to ask me what I’m dreaming about?”

  “You’ve had me do that a lot, remember?”

  “Yes—no—I’m not having you do that now, am I?”

  “You don’t remember what you were dreaming about?”

  “Well, let’s see. Let me think. No, I guess it’s gone. Wait, something about bicycling. No, it was a unicycle. I was riding a unicycle down the Capitol steps, that was it—no, the Lincoln Memorial, because I could see the Capitol down the Mall. People were there like I was giving a speech, a big crowd, giant, but actually I wasn’t giving a speech, I was unicycling up and down the steps, making the hops in both directions and getting a lot of applause. It was great. No one could figure out how I was hopping back up the steps, and I couldn’t either. It was mystifying but fun. All the Republicans I like were there going Shit, Phil, how are we gonna beat that when you can hop up steps on a unicycle.”

  “Mark and Colin?”

  “Yeah, they were pissed. Then all the Republicans I hate were down there getting tossed in the reflecting pools.”

  “A crowd scene.”

  “Like the guppy tank at the pet store. I was planning to ride the unicycle right across their backs once they were all in, keeping my balance no matter what they did. Then you woke me up, bummer, that was going to be fun.”

  “You enjoy your dreams, don’t you Phil.”

  “I do, yeah. Unless I don’t. But most dreams are wish-fulfillment fantasies, I think you’ll find.”

  “Maybe for you. Mine are usually terribly complex problems I can’t possibly solve.”

  “That’s too bad, Wade. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks. So where are you now?”

  “I’m in Kirghiz, I think. Yes. I’m seeing the Kirghiz light.”

  “Very nice. Well. I should let you go back to sleep.”

  “I’d like that Wade.”

  “All right. Thanks for calling, Phil.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Oh, and by the way, just one thing?”

  “… yeah?”

  “I’m going to make some suggestions and the like down here in your name in the next day or two, Phil, I’m just going to go into ambassador mode because things are moving so fast here and I’m not sure I’m going to have time to check with you but I want to use your name as if everything I suggest is coming from you okay? Is that okay?”

  “How is this different from the way we usually operate?”

  “It isn’t, I just wanted to confirm.”

  “Confirmed. Night night.”

  “Night, Phil.”

  The Antarctic Treaty had always been a fragile thing, a complex of gossamer and blown glass which had spun in the light of history like a beautiful mobile—a utopian project actually enacted in the real world, a model for how people ought to be treating the land everywhere—until it got caught in the pressures of the new century, and at the first good torque shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Now Sylvia presided over the wreckage, hoping still to patch it back together. She was operating on as big a sleep deficit as anyone in town, perhaps even the largest of all; she had spent almost every hour of the crisis in her office or up at Search and Rescue, trying to deal with the multiple emergencies. It had been a trouble-shooter’s nightmare. But at the same time, a part of her began to think (no doubt the part most affected by sleep deprivation) that it was also the ultimate trouble-shooter’s challenge, or even an opportunity: not just to keep plugging away at the succession of little stopgaps that formed her ordinary work, but actually to consider the rehaul of everything.

  She stood at the front of the big central room of the Chalet, watching people file in. A lot of people wanted to talk to her, and she had told them all to come on over to the Chalet. She was curious to hear them, in part to help her to clarify her own thinking about the situation. What would happen next,
what should happen next? Without laws, without sovereignty, without a military, without police, without economy, without autonomy, without sufficiency—without any of the properties needed in the world to make life real … It was as if they were a small group of travelers in space, marooned on Ice Planet and now forced to invent everything from scratch.

  Except the world was still there, of course. Sylvia had been juggling calls from all over, now that communications were restored; most importantly from NSF’s head offices in Virginia, asking for a quick accounting of the last week, identification of the ecoteurs if possible, and, luckily for her, any recommendations she might have for avoiding such events in the future. Also, the home office clearly wanted to contain the problem as much as she did, to minimize it and declare it an isolated anomaly, a sport in biological terms, so that the military was not called back in for good, and the Antarctic taken out of NSF’s hands. All perfectly appropriate in Sylvia’s opinion; but one Navy plane had made it down already, at great risk, and a big task force would soon follow to investigate the ecotage, naturally; and what would happen then was anyone’s guess. The big storm (inevitably termed a superstorm in the U.S. popular press) had stalled all these outsiders in Christchurch, however, and so she had this little window of opportunity to conduct her own investigation.

  Now here they were, filing into the big room. The ASL managers; Geoff Michelson and some of his colleagues, just returned from the Dry Valleys; several Kiwis from Scott Base; Ta Shu; Mr. Smith; Wade Norton; Carlos and X, and some of Carlos’s colleagues from the SCAG consortium; Val and some of her clients. Others were standing in the loft or in the offices off the main room. The Chalet had seldom seen such a crowd.

  “Thanks for coming,” Sylvia said. “We’re here to discuss what’s happened in the past week, to see if we can make any recommendations to our various contacts in the north concerning where we might go from here, and how we can avoid any repetitions of this kind of thing. My notion is to conduct it like a small and informal scientific conference, with short presentations followed by questions and discussion, with the hope that at the end we could perhaps collaborate on a general statement. This of course will all be merely an addendum to the full official investigations, but I hope it will be useful. Ta Shu has suggested that for a meeting like this we should move our chairs into a circle formation, so that we can all see each other when we’re talking—among other no doubt valid reasons,” waving Ta Shu down, “and I think that’s a good idea, it will save us craning our necks to see who’s talking. So why don’t we do that first, and then begin.”

  When they were rearranged in a rough circle, chairs all the way back to the walls, everyone able to see everyone else (it had been a good idea), Sylvia went on. “Mr. Smith here has arrived privately by boat, and he says he represents the, the ecoteurs who disrupted operations here and in various outlying camps. Without granting him priority, or in any way legitimating those attacks—in fact I condemn them here and now as criminal, dangerous, and useless—still I think we might start by hearing what Mr. Smith has to say concerning their actions.”

  Mr. Smith nodded and rose to his feet. “My clients are private individuals, allied in some senses with the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, and with more than a hundred other mainstream and grassroots environmental groups concerned at the nonrenewal of the Antarctic Treaty and the flagrant violations of its principles in the last two years. Other than that my clients wish to remain anonymous. They undertook to temporarily impair certain of the most egregious examples of Treaty breaking, to protest these operations and draw the world’s attention to them. They wish no harm to anyone, they took great pains to ensure that no one would be injured or killed, and they were successful in that goal, for which they are thankful, aware that in Antarctic the destruction of property will always bring some risk to life.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” someone said, among other various mutterings. There were a lot of fierce looks directed at Mr. Smith from Carlos’s contingent especially, but Sylvia kept her focus on him, and he looked at her as he continued, oblivious to the others.

  “Now of course they are aware that they are the subjects of a vast manhunt on the part of governmental authorities, and this does not surprise them, but they would like to point out that this is typical of law enforcement, to pursue very vigorously individuals performing civil disobedience or other protest actions, while allowing hundreds or even thousands of corporate executives to comprehensively break the laws without obstruction, or even with so-called law enforcement’s help and protection. Corporations and governments from many countries have been despoiling this last wilderness continent in complete contempt for international law, and so for the U.S. Navy and the FBI now to come here searching for my clients is a travesty, the equivalent of arresting the protesters of a crime while the criminals stand right at hand. It makes them not a police but rather a private security force, which might as well take its pay directly from the foreign governments and transnational corporations it is serving. As private security for corporations it makes sense to overlook gross malfeasance while brutally pursuing small individual protest actions, which to corporations are indeed the more dangerous of the two. The small spontaneous protests of individuals suggest after all that democracy might be a real thing, rather than just a cover story told to people to keep them in their places in the economic hierarchy. And of course the idea that democracy might be real is much too dangerous a notion to allow it to spread very far, for if it did, and if everyone acted on truly democratic principles, including protesting obvious crimes against the law, then social control would be impossible and the gross inequities of the current economic order, in which five percent of the world’s population own ninety percent of the world’s wealth, would be revealed for the hypocritical environment-devastating injustice that it is. Democracy in the United States and most of the rest of the industrial West is therefore a false front on a rich man’s mansion, a sham in which people are given a political vote but then clock in each day to an economic system in which their entire lives are regimented by a small group of executives busily downsizing whatever workplace rights people had gained in centuries of struggle. So people can vote, yes, but for politicians all funded by the corporations in control of the system, meaning you can either vote for the part of the owner class that believes in treating its employees well, or for the part that believes in taking as much as possible from its employees, but in any case you have to vote for the continuation of the system and therefore of the owner class. So the right to vote is meaningless. And in such a situation, a nondemocratic situation, civil disobedience and direct nonlethal resistance are the only true options to co-optation within the owner system. And thus as the only true options for resistance these are of course ruthlessly extirpated by the authorities wherever they appear, with the idea of discouraging the spread of protest by rank intimidation. And in the past this has usually worked, for very few want their lives shattered in order to protest an injustice that is massively entrenched and made to appear the natural order of things, and unlikely to fall to any individual act.

  “So the only answer at this point is to use modern technology to act at a distance, and with perfect anonymity. And that is the course my clients have taken. The way they have structured their action makes it impossible for them to be identified, and you can be sure that I will keep their confidentiality, not only as a matter of legal ethics but also from the practical consideration that I myself do not know who they are. I only know that they wish to announce to you that in the current state of materials science, and the balkanization of communication technology, the means now exist to act in ways that encrypt and sequester the identity of the actors so watertightly that no one will ever know who they were. And this will be true in future protest actions as well, if they happen. That being the case, the views of the disenfranchised are going to have to be listened to again, and the environment and the world’s disenfranchised people are going to have to be
re-enfranchised by the dominant order, which is going to have to change, or else anonymous and untraceable nonviolent protests and ecotage will crash the system. The last week in Antarctica is an announcement and demonstration of this fact.”

  He paused to take a breath and Sylvia held up a hand. “Thank you, Mr. Smith! Perhaps we can give someone else a chance to speak now, in response perhaps for a moment or two, and then we’ll get back to you.”

  “Fine,” Mr. Smith said, unperturbed. He sat down.

  “Carlos? You and your colleagues in the Southern Club Antarctic Group were the people most affected by Mr. Smith’s clients’ ecotage. Would you like to make a response to Mr. Smith’s, um, remarks?”

  Carlos popped to his feet. “My pleasure to speak! Contrary to what Mr. Smith has been saying, although there are some of his general remarks that I can agree with, there is no question that our oil and gas exploration, and the extraction of oil and methane hydrates from the polar cap, is both legal and environmentally safe!”

  He waved a finger at Mr. Smith, who was a most unlikely-looking object of anyone’s scorn. “The Antarctic Treaty forbade mineral exploration, yes, but Japan and Russia never ratified the 1991 environmental protocol, and oil companies based in Treaty countries have looked for oil anyway. And now the Antarctic Treaty has expired and renewal has been held up, as everyone knows, mostly because of opposition to the Treaty from corporations based in the United States, using their allies in the American government to hold off approval of the Treaty until it has been altered to allow some exploration rights to them. So for the last two years we have been operating in a vacuum. And the Southern Club Antarctic Group, a group composed of nations in the southern hemisphere who never signed the Antarctic Treaty, and were never invited to join the Treaty conferences—they decided unanimously to pursue the path of clean extraction of important resources, especially methane hydrates, whenever this was deemed technically possible without harming the Antarctic environment in any way. There has been some protest from environmentalist groups in the North about this policy, but these protests come from nations who are using up the world’s resources at five to twenty times the rate of the members of the Southern Club Antarctic Group, so I personally feel that it is very presumptuous for these people of the North to protest when in effect the North has historically conquered the South, taken everything portable back to the North with them, destroyed the southern landscape and left the people of the South in misery, thus prospering so greatly that they can afford to have an upper class at leisure to order the environmental ethics of the countries that they have so shattered and left behind! The hypocrisy of the North, on this as on so many other issues, is endless, and beyond defense. It has beggared our language. It is the major fact in the history of the world in the last five centuries, colonialism that has never really ended, but merely changed formats.”